The well organized and massive immigrations of Khan Asparukh and
his Bulgar followers from north to south of the Danube between the years 679 and
681 serve as a watershed in Bulgarian history. These dates have an importance
comparable to that of the Norman invasion of 1066 in the history of the British
Isles. A large and prosperous part of the Byzantine homeland, after being
ravaged by the Slavs, was now systematically overrun and colonized by an alien
race from the steppes, the proto-Bulgars. These proceeded to set up a military
and political organization which was to challenge the supremacy, if not the very
existence, of Constantinople itself.

The appearance of the proto-Bulgars under Asparukh at the mouth
of the Danube was in itself no sudden or unexpected phenomenon. Asparukh himself
was a scion of the illustrious house of Dulo, to which also belonged Attila the
Hun. It is recorded by Shirakatsi that Asparukh and his followers were
established on the Danube estuary at Pyuki (Pevka) from about AD 650. A quarter
of a century later, the proto-Bulgars began to establish a bridgehead south of
the estuary.

When the Byzantine government’s efficient intelligence service
brought early word of this development to Constantinople. Emperor Constantine IV
Pogonatus (668-85) reacted vigorously. He hastened to conclude peace with the
Arab caliph’s invading Saracen forces, and rushed his armies to the Danube. In
680, a large squadron of Greek ships under the emperor’s personal command sailed
up the Black Sea coast, then disembarked north of the Danube delta. Byzantine
cavalry squadrons were brought in from Anatolia, and reached the Danube via
Thrace, only to get bogged down in the swampy marshes of the delta. The Bulgars
evaded pitched battle with the Greeks; Emperor Constant tine IV, stricken by
illness, abandoned his forces and beat an ignominious retreat. The Byzantine
army attempted to recross the Danube, but was routed by the Bulgars, who
advanced as far as Varna.

42

A peace treaty was then signed, recognizing Khan Asparukh’s
annexation of the former Roman province of Moesia, and providing for the
Byzantines to pay the Bulgars an annual tribute. The federation of the Seven
Slav Tribes soon acknowledged the suzerainty of the Bulgars, and also paid
tribute to Asparukh. The related Slav tribe of the Severi likewise rendered
homage to Asparukh, though they were exempted from paying tribute.

(Plates 6-8)

Khan Asparukh is credited with the foundation of Pliska, the
original capital of the First Bulgarian Empire, situated on an undulating plain
not far from the modern town of Shumen.

The exact numerical strength of the first Bulgar invasion horde
is unknown, and may have been as little as fifty thousand. The role of these
tough, well-disciplined steppe folk in galvanizing the scattered Slav
agricultural communities into political and military activity was to prove
crucial - comparable, in fact to the impact of Rurik and his Varangians on Kiev
Rus’ some two centuries later. It is true that the settled Slavs were ahead of
the nomadic Bulgars in agriculture, weaving, and some of the arts of peace. On
the other hand, it may be argued that the proto-Bulgars were in many respects in
advance of the Slavs in stock-breeding, pottery, sculpture, and even monumental
architecture. Moreover, in literacy the Bulgars led the Slavs prior to the
introduction of Christianity, and produced the remarkable corpus of
proto-Bulgarian inscriptions - these were inscribed in Greek, though they
contain over a score of proto-Bulgar terms, names, and titles.

Historically speaking, the vital point is that the proto-Bulgars
introduced into the chaotic Slav world of the Balkans the notion of

43

an imperial destiny, backed by a rigid military and social
hierarchy. This hierarchy was controlled by a warlike central bureaucracy,
answerable to a single chief, the Sublime Khan. The autocratic power of the khan
was, however, kept in check by ancestral custom, as well as by the jealous
rivalry of the clan chiefs or bolyars, who were often powerful enough to band
together and dethrone or slay any khan who proved incompetent or otherwise
unacceptable to this élite body. In those days of the survival of the fittest,
the aggressive instincts of the proto-Bulgars and their well tried military
aptitude provided a catalyst without which the creation of a viable Slav state
in the Balkans would have been long delayed, if not permanently frustrated.

The precise character of the social and economic relations
between the Balkan Slavs and the proto-Bulgars is hard to establish with
precision. Byzantine chroniclers continue during the eighth and ninth centuries
to distinguish between the domains of the Bulgars, and those of the Slavs (Sclaviniae),
though later all this territory came to be known as Bulgaria. Large tracts of
land were seized forthwith by the proto-Bulgar aristocracy under Asparukh. Even
so, the majority of the Slav peasantry was still free, and serfdom only took
root gradually, particularly after the establishment of Christianity under Tsar
Boris I.

(Fig. 8)

Recent excavations at Devnya (Marcianopolis), in the hinterland
of Varna, indicate that in the villages there was a mingling of Slavs and
proto-Bulgar settlers at an early stage. Slav and Bulgar inhumations with
grave-goods including pottery vessels of both Slav and Bulgar types are found
side by side in village sites from the eighth century onwards. Whereas the Slavs
normally burnt the corpses of their dead, the Bulgars had a preference for
inhumation.

Interesting parallels may be drawn between the domestic
architecture of the pagan Slavs in the Balkans, and that of the proto-Bulgars.
The huts of the Slavs at this period were rather crude circular or square wattle
and daub structures, often sunk into the ground to give the appearance of
semi-dugouts. The Bulgars on the other hand favoured the portable leather tent
or ‘yurt’. These tents were far more decorative and elaborate than is commonly
imagined; a stone model of such a ‘yurt’ on show at the Varna Archaeological
Museum is decorated with a graffito representation of a hunting scene,
indicating that the walls of yurts were painted or adorned with embroidered
panels.

On Asparukh’s death in 701, supreme power passed to Khan Tervel,
son or grandson of Asparukh. Tervel continued the Bulgars’ expansionist policy
in the Balkans, and added parts of eastern Thrace to the new Slavo-Bulgar state.
Tervel was also in a position to intervene in the internal affairs of Byzantium,
through his friendship with an exiled emperor, Justinian II, who sought refuge
at the Bulgar headquarters in 705. This Justinian had had his nose cut off in a
Constantinople palace revolution in 695, hence his nickname of ‘Rhinotmetus’,
and then spent some years in exile at Cherson on the Black Sea, before marrying
the daughter of the khaqan of the Khazars. Quarrelling with the khaqan,
Justinian fled to Pliska, and persuaded Tervel to support him in a military
campaign to regain the throne in Constantinople. Though unable to breach the
capital’s mighty walls, Justinian adroitly crept into the city with a small band
of daring followers. Emperor Tiberius II fled panic-stricken without a struggle,
and Justinian regained his palace and the imperial throne.

Khan Tervel was enthroned by Justinian’s side, and granted the
title of ‘Caesar’. The Bulgar state won renewal of the tribute payments
inaugurated by Emperor Constantine IV. Thus the Bulgars had advanced in a
quarter of a century, between 680 and 705, from the Danube estuary right up to
the Bosporus and the heart of the imperial city, and found that they could even
make and unmake Byzantine emperors. As a further recompense for his services,
Tervel was allowed to annex the small but valuable district of Zagoria in
northeastern Thrace, including the hinterland of the Gulf of Burgas.

Tervel proved himself an active and far-sighted ruler. When
Emperor Justinian II turned against his former Bulgar allies in 708 and landed
in Anchialus (Pomorie) with a large Greek force, Tervel launched a surprise
attack which utterly routed the Byzantines. Three years later, Justinian himself
was deposed and assassinated. In 712, Tervel invaded Thrace and advanced once
more to the gates of Constantinople, retiring home laden with booty.

To the reign of Tervel is also ascribed the capture of the great
port of Varna by the Bulgars. To prevent surprise attacks by the Greek fleet,
the Bulgars built an immense earthwork along the southern portion of Varna Bay,
some 3 kilometres long and 6 metres high. This earthwork incorporates many fine
sculptured stones from the Roman and the

45

Fig. 7 Bulgaria at the time of the First Empire (c. AD 900).
(After Runciman)

46-47

Byzantine period. It proved valuable in 773, when Emperor
Constant tine Copronymus attempted a naval attack on Bulgaria with a large
fleet, but was foiled.

Under pressure from the Arab caliphate, the feeble Emperor
Theodosius III (715-17) sought to neutralize the Bulgar threat by concluding a
political and commercial agreement with Khan Tervel, in 716. The terms of this
treaty are summarized for us by the Byzantine historian Theophanes. The main
political stipulations were that the state frontier should pass along a line
later fortified by the Bulgars and known as the Great Fence of Thrace: the line
extends from the Gulf of Burgas in the northeast, then through Bakajik, to a
point on the river Maritsa about halfway between Philippopolis and Adrianople,
reaching at one point the main Belgrade-Constantinople highway. The second
article of the treaty provided for annual offerings to the Bulgar khan by the
Byzantine court of costly robes and skins, to the value of thirty pounds of
gold. The third clause related to return of prisoners by both sides, also mutual
extradition of Bulgar or Greek refugees and political suspects, who might seek
asylum with the opposing power.

(Fig. 7)

Of exceptional importance was the commercial agreement embodied
in article 4 of the Treaty. There was to be free movement and interchange of
officially licensed traders between Bulgaria and Byzantium, provided that such
merchants were furnished with passports and seals, without which their goods
might be confiscated. This convention enabled the Bulgarians to play an
increasingly active part in exporting Thracian grain to the Byzantine cities on
the Black Sea coast and elsewhere, and in the import of manufactured goods from
Constantinople and the Mediterranean world through these ports into the interior
of the Balkans.

Emperor Leo the Isaurian, who succeeded the ephemeral Theodosius,
ratified the Bulgarian treaty. When the Arabs launched their second great siege
of Constantinople, in 717, Khan Tervel aided the Greek defenders by swooping
down on the Saracen encampment and slaying up to twenty thousand Arabs, before
retiring home laden with booty.

Tervel died in the following year, but is immortalized in one of
the three Madara inscriptions which flank the triumphant equestrian figure
carved on a high cliff almost within view of the Bulgar capital of Pliska (see
Chapter VII).

(Plates 4, 5)

This Greek inscription, carved in the rock-face,

48

mentions Tervel’s services to Emperor Justinian II, his
acquisition of the Zagoria region, and his raid on the Saracens besieging
Constantinople.

The remainder of the eighth century was a period of comparative
stagnation in Bulgarian history, punctuated by wars against Byzantium, and
bloody internal strife. Sources are scarce and one or two of the Sublime Khans
are known only as shadowy entries in the medieval ‘Bulgarian Princes’ List’,
found in Russia. We do not even know the name of Tervel’s successor, who reigned
from 718 to 725. Then came Khan Sevar, who ruled until 740, and was the last of
the great house of Dulo to occupy the throne; with him died out the lineage of
Attila the Hun.

A new but short-lived dynasty sprang up with the accession of a
bolyar named Kormisosh, of the house of Vokil or Ukil. He is mentioned briefly
in the Madara inscriptions. Towards the end of Kormisosh’s reign, in 755, the
warlike iconoclast emperor of Byzantium, Constantine V, called Copronymus
(literally ‘Dung-named’), embarked on a forward policy in Thrace. He settled
many Armenians and Syrians there, and built fortresses for them to inhabit and
defend against the Bulgars. The latter protested; receiving no satisfaction,
Kormisosh invaded Byzantine territory right up to the Long Wall of
Constantinople. There Constantine Copronymus fell upon the Bulgars with his army
and routed them utterly.

Kormisosh died in 756, and was succeeded by his son Vinekh, who
had to bear the brunt of disastrous wars with Byzantium. The Bulgars lost
patience with his record of defeats, and in 761 they rose up against their khan
and massacred him with his family and all the other representatives of the house
of Ukil.

In Vinekh’s place, the bolyars installed the thirty-year-old
Telets, of the house of Ugain. Telets was the leader of the ‘war party’ in
Bulgaria, and ordered a general mobilization, much to the disgust of his Slav
subjects, of whom two hundred thousand deserted to seek refuge in Byzantium. In
June 763, a great battle was fought near Anchialus (Pomorie); the carnage was
immense, but in the end Constantine Copronymus was the victor. Triumphal games
were held in the Constantinople circus, and thousands of Bulgar captives
slaughtered. A few months later, Telets himself was assassinated, together with
the bolyars of his party.

After several years of anarchy, the accession of Khan Telerig in
770 stemmed the tide of defeat. Despite a military reverse in 773, Telerig
reorganized Bulgaria’s military forces, and also turned the tables on Emperor
Constantine Copronymus by the exercise of cunning and guile. On one occasion,
the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes tells us, Telerig sent a messenger to
Constantine to report that opposition activity was rife, and might force him to
take refuge in the Byzantine court. Telerig enquired who were the chief secret
agents of Byzantium within Bulgaria, to whom he, Telerig, could have recourse in
such an emergency. Constantine naively sent Telerig a list of Byzantine spies
within Bulgaria, whom the khan promptly arrested and put to death. Ironically,
Telerig did have to flee the country, in 777; he came to the court of Emperor
Leo IV, accepted Christian baptism, and was accorded a Greek bride, a cousin of
Empress Irene.

During the reign of Irene and her son Constantine VI in
Byzantium, from AD 780 onwards, the Empire had to contend with the capable Khan
Kardam (777-802). At first, the Byzantines succeeded in pushing back the
Bulgarian frontier to the north. In 784, Empress Irene made an imperial progress
from Anchialus, far inland to Berrhoea, the modern Stara Zagora, which she
rebuilt and christened Irenupolis. Serdica also remained firmly in Byzantine
hands.

In 792, however, Kardam inflicted a disastrous defeat on the
youthful Constantine VI at the border fortress of Marcellae. The Byzantine
government had once more to submit to paying tribute to the Bulgarians, who
periodically raised their demands with blackmailing threats of further military
attacks. Constantine VI’s failure to check the Bulgarians helped to bring on the
crisis of 797, in which Empress Irene had the Emperor, her son, blinded, and
assumed autocratic power on her own.

Empress Irene fell from power in 802, and was succeeded by a
former logothete of the Treasury (or Chancellor of the Exchequer), named
Nicephorus. The following year, supreme authority in Bulgaria passed to one of
the mightiest of Bulgaria’s early rulers, Khan Krum the Conqueror.

Krum is generally considered to have sprung from the lineage of
the Bulgar khans of Pannonia, in Central Europe. His youth was occupied

50

so in establishing his power in Hungary and Transylvania, where
he exploited the valuable salt mines. By about 808, Krum had joined these
domains to the old Slavo-Bulgar khanate of Asparukh and his successors, and
taken over as supreme master of Pliska. Krum was now sovereign of a realm which
stretched from Thrace to the northern Carpathians, and from the lower Sava to
the Dniester, and adjoined the Frankish empire of Charlemagne on the Tisza
(Theiss). However, a mighty line of Byzantine fortresses, rebuilt by Constantine
Copronymus, extended in a semicircle south of the Balkan range, barring the
Bulgarian advance into central Thrace and Macedonia; its key points were
Serdica, Philippopolis, Adrianople, and Develtus.

In 809, Krum suddenly appeared at the gates of Serdica. In spite
of its impressive fortifications and strong garrison, he somehow gained an entry
and massacred the defenders, six thousand strong, and numberless civilians.
Several Greek officers, including a distinguished military engineer named
Eumathius, deserted to the Bulgarian side. This triumph was outweighed, however,
by disaster on Krum’s home front: Nicephorus had marched straight on Pliska, at
the other end of Bulgaria, and found it virtually undefended. The Greeks
plundered Krum’s palace and retired rejoicing to Constantinople.

This Byzantine triumph was short-lived. In May 811, Emperor
Nicephorus set off with his son Stauracius on a great expedition designed to
crush the Bulgar menace once for all. On the frontier, at Marcellae, Nicephorus
met a delegation of Bulgarian envoys sent by Krum to sue for peace. Dismissing
these envoys with contempt, Nicephorus pressed on to Krum’s capital of Pliska,
which he devastated for a second time.

(Plates 6-8)

He amused himself by passing Bulgarian babies through threshing
machines, and committed other atrocities. In July, Nicephorus rashly pursued the
Bulgarian army into a rugged part of the Balkan mountains, and marched into a
narrow, steep defile. The Bulgars built wooden palisades at either end of the
pass, then fell upon the trapped Byzantines and massacred them wholesale.
Emperor Nicephorus perished in the fray. This was a terrible blow to imperial
prestige: not since the death of Valens at Adrianople in 378 had an emperor
fallen in battle against the barbarians.

The head of Nicephorus was exhibited on a stake for some days in
front of the jeering Bulgars. Then Krum had it lined with silver and

51

used it as a drinking cup from which to make wassail with his
bolyars, to the refrain of the Slavonic toast of ‘Zdravitsa’, or ‘Good
health!’

Stauracius, son and heir to the Byzantine throne, had been
mortally wounded in the fray, and it now passed to Michael I Rhangabe. Meanwhile
Krum seized Develtus, at the head of the Gulf of Burgas, and deported its
inhabitants, including their Christian bishop, into the interior of Bulgaria.

A year later, in 812, Krum sent to Constantinople an ambassador
named Dargomer (the first Slav name to feature in the official annals of
Bulgaria) to renew the treaty of 716 between Khan Tervel and Emperor Theodosius
III. Krum insisted on the extradition of Bulgarian deserters and refugees from
Greek territory. On Michael’s refusal to hand them over, Krum assaulted the
great Black Sea port and emporium of Mesembria (Nessebăr), situated on an almost
impregnable peninsula north of Burgas. The Byzantine navy failed to relieve the
town, which fell to Krum, along with vast quantities of gold and silver, and
stocks of the Byzantine secret weapon known as ‘Greek fire’, complete with
thirty-six syphons from which to project it.

(Plates 30-32)

In the year following, 813, Emperor Michael I sallied forth to
meet Krum in pitched battle, but suffered a crushing defeat at Versinicia. This
led to Michael being deposed, and succeeded by the wily Leo the Armenian
(813-20). Krum advanced on Constantinople with an immense horde of Slavs and
Bulgars, and demanded to be allowed to fix his lance to the Golden Gate, as a
token of his supremacy. Leo prepared an ambush for Krum, but the Bulgar khan
escaped the assassin’s darts, and vowed revenge on the Greeks. As a result, all
the suburbs of the city, including the rich towns and villages on the far side
of the Golden Horn, and up the European shore of the Bosporus, with their
countless churches and monasteries and sumptuous villas, were sent up in flames.
The emperor’s own palace of St Mamas was looted and burnt, and its ornamented
capitals and sculptured animal figures packed up and loaded into wagons to adorn
the Bulgar capital of Pliska (see Chapter VII). On his way home, Krum captured
Adrianople, and deported most of the surviving inhabitants into Bulgarian
domains north of the Danube. Among these captives was an Armenian family with a
little boy who by an odd twist of fate was later to become the Byzantine emperor
Basil I.

52

Krum now began to plan the coup de grace against the demoralized
Byzantines. Avar auxiliaries poured into Bulgaria from Pannonia, and Slavs
assembled from the Sclaviniae. Vast siege engines were constructed, also
immense catapults, tortoises, battering-rams and ladders. In despair, the Greeks
sent envoys to plead for help from the Western Emperor, Louis, in the hope of
organizing a ‘second front’ from the direction of Germany. But on Holy Thursday,
13 April 814, what seemed like a miracle occurred: Krum burst a blood vessel,
and the ‘new Sennacherib’ died a sudden death.

Such was the terror instilled by Krum and his mighty hordes that
this aspect has distracted us from his administrative and legislative
achievements. Yet we have reason to believe that Krum was a systematic and
clever administrator, as is evidenced, for instance, by the Hambarli inscription
(now in the Varna Archaeological Museum), which takes the form of a rectangular
stone pillar carved with a detailed battle order of the Bulgarian army,
inscribed in Greek, but complete with a number of proto-Bulgar official and
military titles. The Byzantine encyclopaedia known under the name of Suidas
(tenth century) credits Krum with a comprehensive legislative programme,
including measures against perjurers and thieves. Preoccupation with social
welfare is evident in Krum’s injunction that the poor and needy were to be
supported by the rich, under pain of confiscation of property. Hearing that the
Avar realm had fallen partly as a result of drunkenness among the population,
Krum is said to have ordered the rooting up of all vines in Bulgaria - though
how this can be reconciled with his taste for drinking wine out of a human skull
is hard to explain.

When Omurtag succeeded his father Krum, he was young and
inexperienced, and a group of bolyars for a time disputed the succession the to
the throne of Pliska. By the end of 815, however, Omurtag was firmly builder
established in power. He was to prove one of the most enlightened of Bulgaria’s
pagan rulers in spite of his cruel persecution of the Christians, dictated
largely by political considerations; he was a great builder and patron of the
arts.

Omurtag’s first political act was to conclude a thirty years’
peace treaty with the Byzantine Empire, whereby he gave up the territory in
southern Thrace briefly occupied by Krum, and reverted in the main to

53

the line established earlier by Khan Tervel. The Bulgarians then
dug a great ditch and rampart from Develtus (near Burgas on the Black Sea),
inland to Macrolivada, and manned it with a string of guard posts.

(Plates 6-8)

Omurtag used the respite given by the peace treaty to complete a
vast programme of monumental building and public works. He raised for Plates 6-8
himself a great palace at Pliska, to replace that of his father Krum, burnt down
by Emperor Nicephorus. At Transmarisca on the Danube, he built a castle to guard
the northern approach to Pliska; to the southwest, he founded in 821 the
beautifully situated town and future capital of Great Preslav. In the open
countryside not far from Shumen, Omurtag erected the cavalry barracks known as
the Aul of Omurtag, consisting of a square walled stockade built of brick,
complete with stables for horses, and living quarters inside for picked
cavalrymen. A scale model of the Aul may now be seen in the Shumen museum.
Halfway between Pliska and the Danube, Omurtag had a mausoleum built for
himself.

Peace with Byzantium also enabled the Bulgarians to turn their
attention to Western Europe, where they were troubled by the advance of Louis
the German, king of the East Franks. In 827 and again in 829, Omurtag invaded
Pannonia, and imposed his own governors on the local Slav tribes. Peace in this
quarter was not concluded until after Omurtag’s death.

Omurtag’s reign was a time of ideological and religious crisis
and strife. The pagan priests or shamans of the proto-Bulgars, and the heathen
priests of Perun, patron deity of the Slavs, joined in suppressing the numerous
adepts of Christianity dwelling within Bulgarian territory (many of them former
prisoners of war), and also in combatting the influence of the Greek and
Frankish Christians from just over the border. Omurtag himself was aware, it
would seem, of the prestige which Christianity afforded the Byzantine Emperor
and the successors of Charlemagne, as vice-regents of God upon earth. He adopted
the title of ‘ Arkhon, or sovereign, by the grace of Cod’, even though the
supreme pagan god, not the God of the Christians, was meant. Yet reasons of
state demanded massive persecutions of the Christians. Among those who died a
martyr’s death were four bishops, including Archbishop Manuel of Adrianople, and
377 other captives. Their memory was celebrated annually in Constantinople on
January 22, and their martyrdom described in the Greek Synaxarium.

(Fig. 25)

54

The most determined enemies of Christianity, apart from the
priests themselves, were the Bulgar bolyars or noblemen. The Slavonic population
was more responsive to Christian propaganda, much of it emanating from
descendants of the original Byzantine Christians, whose forbears had survived
the waves of invasion in the Balkans. A certain amount of intermingling of the
Slavonic peasant and chieftain classes with these old local elements was
certainly taking place by this period.

Of particular interest is a short choral Office in honour of the
Bulgarian martyrs, discovered in the Vatican Library, and published by Enrica
Follieri in 1963. The hymnographer, evidently a contemporary of these tragic
events, was called Joseph, and is probably to be identified with Joseph of
Studios, a noted Byzantine author. The hymn indicates clearly the varied ethnic
and social background of the Bulgarian martyrs of this period.

In spite of his occasional cruelties, Omurtag remains one of the
most fascinating of all Bulgar rulers. None but a philosopher, albeit a pagan
one, could have dictated the words found on a granite column now embodied in the
Church of the Forty Martyrs at Great Tărnovo:

Man dies,
even though he lives nobly, and another is born; and let the latest born, seeing
this, remember him who made it. The name of the prince is Omurtag, the Sublime
Khan. God grant that he live a hundred years.

However, Omurtag was not fated to live for a century: he died
comparatively young in 831, after reigning for sixteen years.

Under Omurtag’s successors Malamir (831-36) and Pressian (836-52)
the Bulgarians penetrated further into Macedonia, and annexed large areas of
what is now southern Yugoslavia. The internal crisis resulting from the spread
of Christianity, and the exacerbated reaction of the pagan priests, continued at
boiling point, and even led to the execution of Prince Enravotas, a brother of
Khan Malamir, who was converted to Christianity by a Greek captive from
Adrianople.

(Fig. 8)

A new era in Bulgarian history was inaugurated in 852, with the
accession of Khan Boris, who later assumed the name of Michael on his conversion
to the Christian faith. The early part of Boris’s reign was

55

Fig. 8 Prince Boris-Michael. Miniature from a manuscript of the
Didactic Gospel of Constantine of Preslav, in the Moscow Historical Museum.
(After Naslednikova)

occupied with unsuccessful campaigns against the Frankish empire
and its Eastern satellites, notably the Croats. Later Boris attempted,
unsuccessfully, to annex areas of Serbia and what is now Albania.

As the years went by, Boris became aware of the spiritual
bankruptcy of traditional Bulgarian paganism, which had become more and more
associated with social backwardness, illiteracy and also with potential feudal
resistance to the royal power. Paganism, by the mid-ninth century, appeared
clearly inferior both spiritually and politically to Orthodox and Catholic
Christianity alike, as well as to the splendid edifice of Islam under the Arab
caliphs, the triumphant Commanders of the Faithful. Not only did Christianity
offer cultural and social progress through the introduction of literacy and a
disciplined way of life, but it provided a framework for the aggrandisement of
the monarchy: in Byzantine Christianity, especially, the sovereign was conceived
of as a divinely anointed autocrat and a lay pontiff with supreme authority not
only over State and People, but over the Holy Church itself. For a country to
remain pagan, on the other hand, was to opt for political weakness and social
barbarism.

Leaving aside reasons of state, there is no need to question
Boris’s religious conviction, when the moment came to make his decision. Boris

56

had witnessed and heard of the heroism of the Christian martyrs
put to death during preceding reigns - heroism which won international renown,
and brought disgrace and shame upon the cruel, heathen Bulgarians in the eyes of
the world. Boris had certainly heard much of the sublimity of the Orthodox
liturgy, as celebrated in Saint Sophia cathedral in Constantinople and other
shrines well known to Bulgarian merchants and travellers. There is a story told
in the Russian Primary Chronicle concerning the conversion of the
Russians in the tenth century.

Prince Vladimir sends envoys to various peoples in search of the
true faith. The Russian envoys report unfavourably on the Volga Bulgars and the
Germans, but add:

Then we went
to the Greeks [to Constantinople], and they led us to the place where they
worship their God; and we knew not whether we were in heaven, or on earth. For
on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe
it; we know only that there God dwells among men.

How different were these splendours of St Sophia from the crude
mouthings of Bulgaria’s pagan shamans!

While Boris was pondering these matters, a violent religious and
political conflict had set the Papacy and the Constantinople patriarchate at
loggerheads. It was the ambition of Pope Nicholas I (858-67) to reassert the
supremacy of Rome over the entire Church Universal. His refusal to recognize the
legitimate succession of the Constantinople patriarch Photius culminated in 863
in formal excommunication of the latter, in response to which Photius made the
audacious gesture of excommunicating Nicholas.

Just at this time, Prince Rastislav of Moravia sent envoys to
Emperor Michael III in Constantinople, in search of a military and political
alliance. To head the return mission to Moravia, the emperor’s choice fell on
two eminent brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, to
whom the Slavonic peoples are indebted for their conversion to Christianity, and
for the invention of the earliest Slavonic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the
Glagolitic.

Boris of Bulgaria was still toying with the idea of officially
embracing Christianity. One account ascribes his final conversion to a Greek

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slave called Theodore Cupharas, who taught Boris to pray to the
God of the Christians and thus avert a terrible famine which threatened Bulgaria
with starvation. Another version of the events gives the credit to a Christian
painter named Methodius (not to be confused with the missionary from
Thessalonica), who terrified Boris by a realistic mural painting of the Last
Judgement.

It fell to Boris to make a choice between Rome and Byzantium, the
two founts of Christian dogma and discipline. Early in the 86os, Boris evidently
undertook to receive Christianity at the hands of the Frankish Catholic clergy.
This decision had clear-cut political implications. The danger of Carolingian
influence spreading right into Thrace, within easy reach of Constantinople,
seriously alarmed the Byzantines. Emperor Michael III determined on a military
demonstration, moving an army to the Bulgarian frontier, and sending a fleet
along Bulgaria’s Black Sea littoral. The Greeks demanded the abandonment of the
Frankish alliance, and the conversion of the khan of Bulgaria to the Orthodox
persuasion.

The Bulgarian military position was precarious, and the country
suffering from famine, so Boris capitulated at once. In 864 (or, according to
some authorities, in 865), the Bulgarian khan received baptism at the hands of
priests sent from Constantinople, taking the name of Michael after that of the
Byzantine emperor who stood as his sponsor and godfather. Boris abandoned the
pagan Turkic title of khan for the Slavonic ‘knyaz’ or chief prince. Mass
conversion of the people, often by force, followed. A pagan insurrection headed
by many leading Bulgar bolyars was crushed with severity, no less than fifty-two
ringleaders being executed together with their families.

This first honeymoon between the Byzantine and Bulgarian Churches
ended in bitterness and rupture. Antagonized by Greek arrogance, Boris-Michael
decided to renew his former links with the West. In the summer of 866, he sent
envoys both to the court of Louis the German at Ratisbon, and to Pope Nicholas I
in Rome. To the Pope he forwarded a set of 106 questions on theological, social,
also legal and political matters, together with a plea for an independent
patriarch for the Bulgarian Church.

Boris-Michael’s questionnaire to the Pope reflects the usual
mixture of bewilderment and occasional resentment, combined with an honest
desire to please, which marks the response of simple pagans the world

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over, when exposed to the threats and blandishments of
well-meaning Christian missionaries. For all their occasional naivety,
Boris-Michael’s questions to Pope Nicholas, taken together with the Pontiff’s
answers, provide one of the most interesting documents we possess on social
conditions in the First Bulgarian Empire. Were the Byzantines correct, asked
Boris-Michael, in imposing fasts on Wednesdays as well as on Fridays, and in
banning baths on both days? (This love of bathing among the Bulgars is also
demonstrated by the elaborate hypocausts which existed at the residence of Khans
Krum and Omurtag at Pliska.)

(Plate 8)

Should they wear their belts while taking communion, and remove
their turbans in church? Must they abandon their fashion of wearing trousers?
How were they to dispose of their surplus wives, in view of the widespread
custom of polygamy among the pagan Bulgars; Was sexual intercourse permitted on
Sundays or not? Were laymen allowed to conduct public prayers for rain, or only
priests, and could ordinary people make the sign of the Cross over the table
before a meal? How many true patriarchs were there, and was it true that
Constantinople ranked in the hierarchy immediately after Rome?

The Pope’s exhaustive replies to these and many other questions
are most interesting. Nicholas chided Boris-Michael for the severity of his
punishment of civil offenders, and urged him to abandon the use of torture in
criminal proceedings. Forced conversion to Christianity should be replaced by
persuasion. The Pope condemned various pagan practices described in
Boris-Michael’s questionnaire, such as the use of a horse’s tail as a banner for
the army, the seeking of auguries, the casting of spells, and the performance of
ceremonial songs and dances before battle, as well as the taking of oaths on a
sword. The Bulgarians were also urged to give up their superstitious practice of
seeking cures from a miraculous stone, and wearing amulets round their necks as
a protection against sickness. As for the status of the patriarchal see of
Constantinople, Nicholas dismissed its apostolic pretensions contemptuously, and
was scathing in regard to its claim for monopoly of production of the Holy
Chrism. On the setting-up of an independent Bulgarian Church, Nicholas was
prudently evasive, indicating that everything depended on the Christian prowess
of the newly converted Bulgarian nation.

A rapid sequence of events now led up to a definitive swing by
the fickle Bulgarians back towards the fold of Byzantine Orthodoxy. Pope

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Nicholas firmly refused to ratify Boris-Michael's choice of a
Roman Catholic primate for the infant Bulgarian Church, insisting that the
appointment of bishops for Bulgaria was an exclusive papal prerogative. By the
summer of 867, prior to the death of Pope Nicholas and the accession of Hadrian
II, Bulgarian relations with Rome became strained.

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, a palace revolution took place in
September 867, in the course of which Emperor Michael III was murdered by his
favourite protégé, the future Basil I, himself an Armenian who had spent part of
his childhood as a captive in Bulgaria. Basil deposed Patriarch Photius and
reinstated his rival Ignatius. Since Ignatius was persona grata with the
Papacy, his appointment restored communion between Constantinople and Rome. A
council of the Oecumenical Church, attended by representatives of Pope Hadrian
II, was held in Constantinople during 869 and 870, and decided that Bulgaria
should depend on the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople, and thus Bulgaria
duly receive her semi-autonomous archbishop and subordinate clerics from the
metropolitan see of Byzantine Christendom.

The next landmark in the history of Bulgarian Christianity
occurred in 885, when Methodius died in Moravia, his whole work apparently on
the brink of failure. Methodius had towards the end of his life fallen out with
the Papacy, partly as a result of his refusal to tolerate any tampering with the
Nicene Creed. The death of Methodius meant the end of the Slavonic liturgy in
Central Europe. He had named his ablest disciple Gorazd as his successor, but
Gorazd was unable to maintain his position in face of relentless opposition from
the Latin and German clergy, egged on by the Moravian Prince Svatopluk I. The
leaders of the Slavonic Church in Moravia - Gorazd, Clement, Nahum, Angelarius,
Laurentius and Sabbas - were imprisoned; some of them were then deported, and on
reaching Belgrade, were warmly welcomed by Boris-Michael’s viceroy there, who
sent them on to Pliska. Other survivors of the Slavonic Moravian Church reached
the Bulgarian capital via Venice, where they had been sold as slaves, and
redeemed by Byzantine envoys acting on behalf of Emperor Basil I.

About 886, Clement was sent from Pliska to Macedonia, with
instructions to baptize any who were still pagans, to celebrate the liturgy in
the Slavonic tongue, translate Greek religious texts, and train a native

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clergy. The centre of his activity was the district of Devol (in
present' day Albania), between Lake Ohrida and the Adriatic; after consecration
as bishop in 893, Clement concentrated on the Ohrida area itself. Thanks to
Clement’s exemplary labours over a period of thirty years, Macedonia (above all
Ohrida) became a leading centre of Slavonic Christian culture, and a hearth of
early Bulgarian civilization.

At first, Clement’s comrade Nahum remained in northeastern
Bulgaria, where, both in Pliska and at the royal monastery of St Panteleimon
(Patleina) close to Preslav, he helped to found another school of Old Bulgarian
literature, until transferred to Macedonia in 893 to assist Clement in his
educational and missionary labours. The importance of Clement, Nahum and their
associates in laying the foundations of Old Bulgarian literature and Christian
culture is examined in more detail in Chapter VI.

In 889 after a reign of thirty-seven years - one of the longest
in Bulgaria’s annals - Boris abdicated and retired to a monastery, possibly that
of St Panteleimon at Preslav. The throne passed to Vladimir, eldest son of
Boris, who immediately abandoned most of his father’s policies in favour of a
return to paganism, in which he was encouraged by the reactionary Bulgar
bolyars. Court life became extravagant and debauched, and the Byzantine alliance
was abandoned for a pact with the German emperor Arnulf.

The reign of this Bulgarian equivalent of Julian the Apostate
lasted four years, until 893, when Boris was finally provoked to the point of
rallying the faithful against his own son. After having Vladimir blinded and
imprisoned, Boris summoned a general assembly of the nation, which proclaimed
Boris’s younger son, the monk Symeon, as ruler, annulling Symeon’s monastic
vows. From now on, Slavonic replaced Greek as official language of the Bulgarian
State, and the capital of the country was moved from Pliska, with its pagan
associations, to Preslav, which Boris had already beautified with churches and
monasteries, workshops and scriptoria.

(Plates 18-21, Figs. 30-33)

Under the reign of Tsar Symeon, which lasted more than thirty
years, the might of the First Bulgarian Empire reached a new peak, equalling the
epic age of Khan Krum. Symeon had originally been trained for the post of
archbishop of Bulgaria. Raised in Constantinople,

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as a royal hostage, he followed courses at the University
installed in the Magnaura palace. He became a proficient Greek scholar, with a
taste for the works of Aristotle and Demosthenes; later he came to favour the
Fathers of the Christian Church.

On emerging from his cell to take over the Bulgarian throne from
his blinded brother, Vladimir, Symeon soon adapted himself to the outside world,
and the requirements of statecraft and war. Towards the end of his life, indeed,
he developed a streak of militaristic megalomania. Like Krum before him, Symeon
dreamed of founding a new Slavo-Byzantine empire centred on Constantinople, the
head of which would be himself, a Bulgarian, arrayed in the imperial purple of
the Greeks.

Meanwhile, Symeon set out to transform Preslav into a second
Constantinople. According to a contemporary writer, John the Exarch, visitors to
Preslav were overcome by the sight of all the great Plates 18-21, churches and
palaces, decorated with marbles and frescoes, and depicting the sights of
heaven, the stars, sun and moon as well as flowers and trees and the fishes of
the deep.

(Figs. 30-33)

In the midst of all this splendour sat Symeon himself, enthroned
‘in a garment studded with pearls, a chain of medals round his neck and
bracelets on his wrists, girt with a purple belt, and having a golden sword by
his side’. John the Exarch adds that any rustic Bulgarian tourist who glimpsed
these sights would return home, disenchanted with the simplicity of his own
humble cottage, but eager to tell his friends about the wonders of Symeon’s new
city.

War with Byzantium broke out in 894, the year after Symeon’s
accession. The immediate casus belli was a commercial dispute. Since Khan
Tervel’s commercial treaty of 716, there had existed a regular Bulgarian trade
depot in Constantinople, protected by special imperial privileges. Under Tsars
Boris and Symeon, the Bulgarians came to depend increasingly on export outlets
for their local products - wines, beasts, corn, timber and many other
commodities - and the chief outlet was Constantinople. In exchange, the
Bulgarians imported Byzantine and oriental manufactured products, such as dyed
silk, jewellery and porcelain, also spices. A crisis arose when the courtier
Stylianus Zautses, Logothete of the Drome, encouraged two Greek merchants to
establish a monopoly of Greek trade with Bulgaria, the depot for which they
transferred from Constantinople to Thessalonica, where heavy taxes were imposed
on Bulgarian goods.

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Symeon demanded compensation for losses sustained. Rebuffed,

Symeon invaded Thrace and marched on Constantinople. Emperor Leo
VI responded by sending envoys to the Magyars, who at this time were encamped
north of the Danube estuary, in the plain of Bessarabia. The Magyars were
ferried across the Danube by the Greek fleet, and advanced on Preslav, forcing
Symeon to abandon his march on Constantinople and hurry northwards to defend his
own capital. Symeon in his turn persuaded the dreaded Turkic Pechenegs to attack
the Magyars from the direction of the Dnieper, forcing them to move westwards
over the Carpathians into the Pannonian plain, where they founded the medieval
kingdom of Hungary.

Peace was concluded in 897 on terms quite favourable to Bulgaria,
including provision for an annual tribute of gifts to be rendered to Symeon by
the Greeks. This treaty lasted for fifteen years, until Leo Vi’s death in 912.
Then Leo’s brother, the short-lived alcoholic emperor Alexander, insulted
Symeon’s envoys sent to renew the 897 treaty. War broke out, and lasted with
intervals until Symeon’s death in 927. On one occasion, in 924, Symeon reached
the walls of Constantinople and engaged in personal parley with Emperor Romanus
Lecapenus.

An interesting source for the history of the period is the
exchange of letters between Patriarch Nicholas of Constantinople and his
erstwhile brother in Christ, the renegade monk Symeon, now prince of the hosts
of Bulgaria. These letters, alternately threatening and cajoling, and Symeon’s
disrespectful, bantering replies, illustrate the paradoxical character of this
Christian ruler whom fate had turned into the bitterest foe of Byzantium - the
fount of Bulgaria’s new Christian culture. At times, Symeon acted as a worthy
candidate for the imperial crown of Byzantium; at others, he behaved like the
veritable descendant of Attila the Hun, reverting to the uncouth ways of his
ancestors.

Symeon was the creator of both the Bulgarian Empire, and the
Bulgarian patriarchate. In 925, he proclaimed himself Emperor and Autocrat of
the Romans and the Bulgars, a title ratified by the Pope, and revived later
under the Second Bulgarian Empire. (By the Romans, are meant the Byzantine
Greeks and their subject races.) In 926, Symeon proclaimed the independence of
the Bulgarian Church within the Orthodox communion, under its own patriarch, the
former Archbishop Leontius.

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Out of the ordinary in so many respects, Symeon was remarkable
even in the manner of his death. In May 927, a Greek astrologer told Emperor
Romanus Lecapenus that the thread of Symeon’s life was bound up with the
existence of a certain marble column in the Constantinople forum. On May 27,
Romanus, as an experiment, had this column’s capital removed. At this same hour,
Tsar Symeon died of heart failure. Apocryphal though it may be, this story gives
some impression of the awe inspired by this larger than lifesize, controversial
ruler.

It was under Symeon that the military and government machinery of
the First Bulgarian Empire reached its greatest size and complexity. Although no
comprehensive survey of this machinery exists, yet we can piece together from
various sources and inscriptions a fair picture of the salient features of this
state structure.

Slavonic and proto-Bulgar titles continued to exist side by side
for over a century after Bulgaria’s conversion, while ecclesiastical ranks are
largely taken from the Greek. To give a few examples, we find that under
Boris-Michael the Sublime Khan becomes Knyaz or Prince, a Slavonic title
used in Russia up to modem times; Symeon assumed the title of Tsar or Emperor.
The Bulgar aristocracy of the boïlyas or bolyars had their name
transformed into the Slavonic form boyar. Tribal chiefs bore the Slavonic
title zhupan, a princely dignity even better known in medieval Serbia.
Constantine Porphyrogenitus refers to a high military officer termed
'Alo-Bogotur’, embodying the Turkic bagatur (Russian, bogatyr),
meaning a hero. From the end of the ninth century dates a handsome lead seal of
a certain Bulgar Khan-Bagatur Irtkhituin; the seal, which is illustrated in
Vasil Gyuzelev’s biography of Boris I, is adorned with a Christian cross. Around
AD 950, we encounter the tombstone of a certain Mostich, with an important
Slavonic inscription mentioning that he was chărgoboïlya (officer in
charge of state security) under Tsars Symeon and Peter, and had retired at the
age of eighty to become a monk.

(Fig. 9)

Sometimes high Bulgarian officials would be known to the
Byzantines by Greek equivalents of their Bulgarian titles; thus the Bulgarian tarkhan of Belgrade is referred to in the Life of St Clement of Ohrida as
hypostrategus or military governor-general of the province. Greek ranks and
titles, for obvious reasons, predominated in the Bulgarian Church.

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Fig. 9 Tombstone of Mostich, a retired state official, who died
about AD 950. It bears an important early Cyrillic inscription. (After Stanchev)

Apart from such common terms as those of patriarch or bishop
(‘episkop’), we find in Bulgaria the title of exarch, also that of syncellus. The latter was, in Byzantium, a high cleric, who often acceded
later to the patriarchate; he was appointed by the emperor in agreement with the
patriarch, and was instituted with much pomp at a ceremony in the imperial
palace. The syncellus, in Byzantium at least, took precedence over all the
ordinary officials and acted as a kind of liaison officer between the emperor
and the patriarch.

It has to be noted, however, that in spite of the elaborate
structure of State power under Symeon, the commercial and financial base
remained primitive and weak. Although the later rulers of the First Bulgarian
Empire made lead, silver and gold seals for ceremonial and business use, none of
them attempted to strike coins in their own name. They remained slavishly
dependent on the Byzantine currency and on barter. An independent coinage did
not evolve in Bulgaria until after the establishment of the Second Bulgarian
Empire at Tărnovo, at the very end of the twelfth century.

Symeon’s imperial title and grandiose conquests had been bought
at too high a price. The country was exhausted. Symeon’s successor, Tsar Peter,
was physically a weakling, under whom Bulgaria rapidly fell

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into decline. The Byzantines wisely bided their time; they even
established a form of alliance with Bulgaria by granting young Tsar Peter an
imperial bride, the Princess Maria, granddaughter of Romanus Lecapenus, known in
the annals of Bulgaria as Empress Irene.

Peter’s reign, which lasted from 927 to 969, was one of the
longest but most disastrous in Bulgarian history. The country lay inert, a
passive prey to savage invaders from the north. In 934, for instance, the
Magyars made a deep incursion into the Balkans, and reached Develtus, near
Burgas; so great was the number of their captives that a pretty woman could be
bought for a silk dress. The humbler classes were restless; in 930, Peter’s
brother Michael escaped from the monastic cell to which he had been relegated,
and made off to the western mountains, where he founded a kind of brigand
kingdom aided by large bands of Slav malcontents.

This general unrest also found expression in a most wide-spread
and politically dangerous heresy, that of Bogomilism. This will be dealt with in
more detail in Chapter V, and here it will suffice to observe that the Bogomils
taught that matter was the creation of the devil, and that the service of
principalities and powers was anathema to God, as was the whole structure and
hierarchy of the Orthodox Church. As so often before and since (and we have only
to think of the French Huguenots or Cromwell’s Puritan Roundheads), religious
dissent gave rise to militant social action; and in the absence of anything like
modern political parties, the pent-up resentment of the underprivileged found an
outlet in Bogomilism as a new, exciting form of religious protest.

Towards the end of his life, in 965, Peter made a diplomatic
blunder which was to plunge Bulgaria into fresh misery. He sent envoys to
Constantinople to demand from the new, warlike Emperor Nicephorus Phocas
(963-69) a resumption of the subsidy which the Byzantines had formerly paid to
the Bulgarian Sublime Khans, and which the Greeks had renewed in the form of a
dowry when Tsar Peter of Bulgaria married the Greek princess Maria-Irene in 927.
But Maria-Irene had just died, and Nicephorus Phocas professed himself highly
insulted at this Bulgarian demand for what was described as ‘the customary
tribute’. Nicephorus and his courtier poured abuse on the Bulgarian ambassadors,
terming them ‘filthy beggars’, and cursing their master, Tsar Peter, as being no
emperor, but a princeling clad in skins.

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Possibly this was but a form of diplomatic provocation, designed
to prepare the way for unleashing upon the enfeebled Bulgarians the military
might of the Russians and Varangians, who constituted a regular threat to
Constantinople through their superior naval strength. Peter did his best to fend
off the approaching menace, sending his two sons Boris and Romanus as hostages
to Constantinople. But Nicephorus continued with his plans; he sent an envoy to
the Russian court in Kiev, bearing a subsidy of 1,500 pounds of gold, as an
inducement to the heathen Prince Svyatoslav to cross the Danube and invade
Bulgaria from the north.

In August 967, Prince Svyatoslav crossed the Danube with the
imperial the ambassador Calocyras as guide, and sixteen thousand men. Svyatoslav
Russians in overran the north of Bulgaria, capturing twenty-four towns, and then
Bulgaria set up a wartime capital at Khan Asparukh’s old fortress of Little
Preslav on the Danube. Svyatoslav took such a fancy to this region that he
seriously thought of moving his capital permanently from Kiev to Little Preslav,
which he found a most attractive spot; it was also an important economic centre,
receiving silver, fabrics, wines and fruits from Greece; silver and horses from
Bohemia and Hungary; and skins, wax, honey and slaves from Russia itself.

Marching south, Svyatoslav captured Great Preslav in 969,
proceeding thence to storm Philippopolis (Plovdiv), the metropolis of Thrace.
Emperor Nicephorus realized that the situation had got thoroughly out of hand,
and that the Russians would soon be appearing at the gates of Constantinople by
land, as they had already several times appeared by ship. Another disquieting
factor was the news that Patrician Calocyras, the imperial ambassador, had
turned traitor, and was seeking to make a bid for the imperial throne of
Constantinople.

Nicephorus was indeed in dire peril, but the blow when it fell on
the night of 10 December 969 came from within his own household. Empress
Theophano had taken as her lover the Armenian general John Tzimiskes, who was
the moving spirit in a palace plot that put an end to Nicephorus’s life as well
as to his warlike plans, which were to be worthily continued by Tzimiskes
himself. It is interesting to note that Tzimiskes, who was to extinguish the
First Empire in Eastern Bulgaria, was born in a small Armenian town called
Khozan in Anatolia, which

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later adopted the emperor’s name - Tshmishkatzak. He was a great'
nephew of an outstanding Armenian general in the Byzantine service, the Grand
Domestic John Curcuas.

John Tzimiskes immediately turned his attention to the situation
in the Balkans, deputing the half-Armenian Bardas Sclerus to take charge of
operations. In Bulgaria, Tsar Peter had died in 969, to be succeeded by his son
Boris II, who had been sent back from Constantinople.

The Russian prince Svyatoslav failed to take the measure of
Tzimiskes’s military genius, and sent insolent messages to Constantinople,
affecting to order the Byzantines out of Europe altogether, unless an enormous
tribute was paid. In the spring of 971, at the head of a large and well' trained
army, Tzimiskes set out on one of the most brilliant campaigns in Byzantine
history. In April he took Great Preslav from the Russians after a furious
battle. Svyatoslav’s men then fell back to the Danube and fortified themselves
in Silistra (Dristra, Dorystolum). After three months of siege the Russians and
Varangians were worn out by the assaults of the Byzantine crack troops and
harassment by fire-shooting ships of the imperial Byzantine navy on the Danube.
Svyatoslav capitulated, and negotiated an armistice to allow himself and his
followers to return unmolested to his capital of Kiev, pledging himself never
again to attack Byzantium, Bulgaria, or the Byzantine Black Sea port of Cherson.
But he was ambushed by the Pechenegs on his homeward journey and slain in battle
close to the Dnieper rapids, in 972.

Tzimiskes returned to Constantinople, taking with him the
Bulgarian royal family and great quantities of booty, to celebrate a traditional
victor’s triumph in the city. Instead of riding in the imperial chariot drawn by
four white horses, he set in his own place of honour a greatly venerated icon of
the Virgin, which he had brought with him from Bulgaria; the Emperor himself
followed devoutly behind. During the ceremony, Tzimiskes stripped the Bulgarian
Tsar Boris of the insignia of royalty, but raised him to the rank of magister in
the Byzantine hierarchy. Boris’s brother Romanus was castrated, to disqualify
him from attempting to restore the Bulgarian monarchy. The Bulgarian Church now
also lost its independent status, at least in eastern Bulgaria. The separate
Bulgarian patriarchate was suppressed for the time being after an existence of
less than half a century; the Bulgarian Church was re' organized under Greek
bishops sent from Constantinople.

Emperor Tzimiskes distinguished himself further by conquests in
Anatolia and the Levant, but perished - probably poisoned - in 976 while still
in his prime. The death of this formidable warrior provoked a of sudden revival
Bulgarian independence, centred on the western regions of Macedonia. It is a
remarkable coincidence that this resurgence of Bulgarian independence was headed
by a family of four brothers of wholly or partly Armenian descent - as in the
case of Emperor Tzimiskes, who had overthrown the Bulgarian realm of Symeon,
Peter and Boris II. These four brothers, David, Moses, Aaron and Samuel, are
commonly known as the Comitopuli, their father Nicholas being a provincial comes or count, possibly governor of Sofia. Their mother’s name was
Hripsime, a common and exclusively Armenian name, taken from that of one of the
holiest martyrs of the early Armenian Church.

Samuel and his brothers raised the standard of revolt in the name
of the legitimate Bulgarian king, Boris II, who somehow made his way from
Byzantium to Bulgaria, but was accidentally shot dead by a Bulgarian sentry. Two
of Samuel’s brothers perished, while Aaron was murdered by his brother Samuel,
who suspected him of treason. Thus by the end of the century Samuel was
unrivalled master of a new Bulgarian empire, based largely on Macedonia.

Samuel’s empire had its centre first at Prespa, later on at
Ohrida, where he re-established the Bulgarian patriarchate, after its various
peregrinations to Sofia, Vodena, Moglena and Prespa; as an ecclesiastical
centre, Ohrida was to survive Samuel’s empire by several centuries, and is now
one of the glories of southern Yugoslavia.

It was not until 993, after several victories over the Byzantines
in Thessaly and near Sofia, that Samuel finally assumed the title of Tsar.
Samuel conquered the Serbian territories as far as Zara on the Adriatic, and
also took the Srem region from the Magyars. Other acquisitions included the
northern half of Greece with Epirus, much of Albania, including Dyrrachium (the
modern Durazzo) and finally Rascia and Dioclea. In 997, Samuel briefly
reoccupied Bulgaria’s original heartland, the region of Pliska and Preslav, and
the hinterland of Varna, only to lose it again to the Byzantine emperor, Basil
II, in 1001. Geographically, Samuel’s strength lay in the Macedonian kernel of
his realm, oriented towards the west and the south, though in most respects
Samuel’s short-lived empire was a true successor to that of Tsar Symeon.

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After loot, the fortunes of war began to turn against Samuel.
Following his successful campaigns against the rebellious aristocracy of Asia
Minor, and the Muslim Fatimids in Syria, Basil II undertook a number of
campaigns, each of which resulted in the detaching of a province from the
Bulgarian empire. Despite the stubborn resistance of the population, in which
the Bogomil heretics also played their part, the Greeks systematically
reconquered all Bulgaria’s northeastern territories, as well as Thessaly and the
regions of Sofia (Sredets) and the Danube stronghold of Vidin. Some of the
boyars wavered in their allegiance to Samuel, and began to pass over to the
Byzantine emperor.

The fighting continued indecisively for several years. Emperor
Basil II took advantage of a lull to reinforce his army, and to bribe more of
the Bulgarian magnates to desert Samuel’s cause. In the 1014 campaign in the
Belassitsa Mountains, the Bulgarian army was attacked in the rear, taken by
surprise and utterly defeated. Fourteen thousand warriors were taken prisoner,
and Samuel himself barely escaped with his life. Basil II blinded all the
prisoners, except for one man in every hundred, who was to have one eye left, so
that he could lead his comrades back home to their sovereign. The terrible sight
of these men caused Tsar Samuel to die of shock. Basil’s ruthlessness earned him
the title of ‘Bulgaroktonos’ or ‘the Bulgar-slayer’, of which he was very proud.

(Fig. 10)

Samuel’s son Gabriel Radomir reigned for only one year, from 1014
to 1015, before being murdered by his cousin Ivan Vladislav, who occupied the
throne from 1015 to 1018. Ivan Vladislav who left an important Slavonic
inscription at Bitolya to posterity perished in battle at Dyrrachium, thus
bringing independent Bulgaria’s death struggle to an end. Basil II made a
ceremonial entry into Ohrida, receiving homage from the Tsar’s widow and the
other surviving members of the royal house. The whole Balkan peninsula now
belonged to the Byzantine Empire, for the first time since the Slavonic
migrations almost five centuries before.

The subjection of Bulgaria to direct Byzantine rule lasted rather
more than a century and a half, until 1185, though it was punctuated by a series
of rebellions.

It must be conceded that the civil policy of Emperor Basil II the
Bulgar-Slayer towards the defeated Bulgarians was as moderate as his behaviour
towards his defeated foe on the battlefield had been cruel and brutal. In view
of the wide-spread devastation throughout the Balkans, Basil exempted the
Bulgarians from paying taxes in gold and silver, and accepted instead payment in
kind, in the form of beasts, agricultural products and other local commodities.

Byzantium’s newly conquered Bulgarian territory was now divided
into administrative districts, which were called ‘themes’. The capital was
established at Skoplje, the governor-general of which had the exalted title of
‘strategus’. Among other important provinces was that of Paristrion or
Paradunavon on the Danube, with its capital at Silistra. The region on the
Adriatic coast, which had belonged to Bulgaria under Tsar Samuel, now formed the
theme of Dalmatia. Some years later, around 1067, we find mention of the
Byzantine theme or province of Serdica, whose dux was then the future
emperor Romanus Diogenes.

The Bulgarian patriarchate of Ohrida was down-graded to an
archbishopric. However, the special privileges of this Church foundation were
retained under the new dispensation. The Ohrida archbishopric was recognized as
autocephalous within the Byzantine hierarchy, and its incumbent was appointed
personally by the Byzantine emperor, not by the Oecumenical patriarch of
Constantinople.

Vivid, not to say scandalous sidelights on the relations between
the Byzantine clerics and their Bulgarian and Macedonian flock are given in the
letters of the Greek Archbishop Theophylact of Ohrida, who flourished at the end
of the eleventh century and composed a biography of his predecessor, St Clement
of Ohrida. In one epistle, Archbishop Theophylact remarks to his correspondent:

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By saying
that you have thoroughly become a barbarian among the Bulgarians, you, dearest
friend, say aloud what I myself dream in my sleep. Because - think of it - how
much I have drunk from the cup of vulgarity, being so far away from the lands of
wisdom, and how much I have imbibed owing to the prevailing lack of culture!
Since we have been living for a long time in the land of the Bulgarians,
vulgarity has become our close companion and mate.

The Bulgarians, we gather, had driven Theophylact to drink. In
another of these outspoken epistles, he scornfully refers to the Bulgarians as
‘unclean barbarians, smelling of hides, poorer in their way of life than they
are rich in evil disposition’. Writing to his subordinate, the Bishop of Vidin,
Theophylact exclaims:

And so do
not lose heart, as if you were the only one to suffer! Are there Cuman tribes
invading your land; What are they, however, in comparison with the local people
of Ohrida who come out from the city to attack us! Have you got treacherous
citizens; Yours are nothing but children in comparison with our own citizens,
Bulgarians that they are!

Genuine sympathy between the Greek master race and the Bulgarian
population was assuredly lacking. Latent antipathies flared up after Basil II’s
death, largely as a result of the rapacious fiscal policy of Emperor Michael IV
the Paphlagonian (1034-41). Taxes were steadily increased, and had now to be
paid in hard cash. The local Greek governors enriched themselves as quickly as
possible and then retired home to enjoy their spoils; peasants were snatched
from the fields, and com scripted to fight in remote lands against the foes of
the Byzantine Empire.

The financial policy of the central government provoked the Slavs
of the Balkans to break out in revolt. When the Slav Archbishop of Ohrida, John,
died in 1037, a Greek named Leo was appointed in his place. The rebellion which
now broke out soon took on dangerous proportions. A pretender named Peter
Delyan, grandson of Tsar Samuel and probably a son of the Bulgarian ruler
Gabriel Radomir, was proclaimed tsar in Belgrade in 1040. When Prince Alusianus,

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a son of Tsar John Vladislav, who managed to escape from
Constantinople, was proclaimed coAuler the insurrection spread throughout the
Balkans and northern Greece. Lack of unity among the leaders of this revolt led
to its collapse in 1041, after the treacherous Alusianus had enticed Peter
Delyan to a banquet and there gouged out his eyes in an ambush.

The second half of the eleventh century was marked by a steady
decline in internal security in Bulgaria and the Balkans. The Hungarians
attacked the Byzantine Empire from the north, and in 1064 they seized Belgrade.
A swarming horde of Tatar nomads, akin to the Pechenegs and known as the Uzes,
left the steppes of South Russia and poured through Moldavia into the Balkans in
the autumn of 1064. Bulgarian territory, including Macedonia and Thrace as well
as northern Greece, was ravaged by these savage invaders. However, a devastating
plague, hailed by the pious as a miracle, rid the Empire of most of the Uzes;
the survivors either fled across the Danube, or entered the Byzantine service.

The year 1071 brought fresh disasters to Byzantium. In that year,

Bari in Italy fell into the hands of the Normans under Robert
Guiscard, while to the east in farthest Armenia, the imperial army commanded by
Emperor Romanus was annihilated by the Turks, and Romanus himself captured.
Released the following year, he was blinded by his rivals and died before the
year was out. Asia Minor, from which derived so much of the strength of the
Byzantine armies, was largely overrun by the Seljuq Turks.

All this encouraged insurgents in the Balkans. In 1072, a fresh
revolt broke out in the territories which had once formed the nucleus of Tsar
Samuel’s domains. The rebels were supported by the principality of Zeta, on the
Adriatic; Constantine Bodin, the son of Prince Michael of Zeta, was crowned Tsar
in Prizren. In Bulgaria proper, the standard of revolt was raised by the boyar
Georgi Voiteh.

Although this revolt was soon crushed, fresh unrest broke out in
Bulgaria in 1074, 1079, and again in 1084.

The troubled internal situation was exploited increasingly by the
Bogomils (see next chapter), one of whose strongholds was Plovdiv, the
metropolis of Thrace. Here Slavs and Greeks lived side by side with numerous
Armenians, who had long since introduced their own national

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brand of religious heresy, a form of Paulicianism. Partly to
combat these heretics the Byzantine ‘Grand Domestic’ or Commander-in-chief in
the West, an Armenian adherent of the Georgian Orthodox faith, Gregory Bakuriani
or Pacurianos by name, built the magnificent monastery of Bachkovo, south of
Assenovgrad (1083). This monastery was placed in the hands of Georgian monks,
though later taken over by Greeks and then by Bulgarians. As for the Bogomils
and Paulicians, the outstanding Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118)
devoted much energy to largely fruitless attempts to convert or suppress them,
as we read in the Alexiad, a biography written by the emperor’s daughter,
Princess Anna Comnena. Many of these Bogomils endured agonizing tortures, or
chose to be burnt alive, rather than abandon their beliefs.

At the end of the eleventh century, fresh trouble beset the
hapless Bulgarians, in the shape of the disorderly hordes of Westerners who
passed through the Balkans in the course of the First Crusade in 1096. Their
leader was Peter the Hermit, who regarded the Orthodox Bulgarians as heretics,
and did nothing to stem the ensuing violence, pillage and arson. The same
pattern was repeated at the time of the Second Crusade, in 1147. However, these
injuries were to be amply repaid after Bulgaria regained her independence, as we
shall see.

There was little the Bulgarians could do but bide their time, and
dream of freedom, as they recalled the heroic age of Tsars Symeon and Samuel.
Their moment came in 1185, when the Sicilian Normans attacked the Byzantine
possessions along the Adriatic and in Greece, capturing Durazzo (Dyrrachium),
and Thessalonica. The last emperor of the Comnenus dynasty, Andronicus, was torn
to pieces in Constantinople on 12 September 1185 by an enraged and
panic-stricken mob.

The Comnenoi were succeeded by the Angelus dynasty, first in the
person of Isaac II (1185-95), of whom it was said that he sold government jobs
like vegetables in a market. No sooner had Isaac assumed the purple than he
imposed heavy special taxes, on the occasion of his dynastic marriage with the
ten-year-old daughter of the King of Hungary.

The Vlachs of the Balkans sent two of their number, the brothers
Peter and Assen, to negotiate with Emperor Isaac. The brothers, who owned land
and castles in the neighbourhood of Great Tărnovo, made

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certain requests for grants of feudal lands and privileges, which
were curtly dismissed - a Byzantine courtier even slapping Assen in the face.
The infuriated brothers rode swiftly back to Tărnovo. The news of their
humiliation spread like wildfire. An uprising was proclaimed in one of the
leading churches of the city on the Yantra; and insurrection was soon rife
throughout northeastern Bulgaria. The rebellion spread into Thrace, and imperial
troops sent to suppress it were three times defeated.

Emperor Isaac himself set out on campaign in 1186, and
temporarily drove the insurgent Bulgarians and Vlachs beyond the Danube, into
Wallachia. Soon they were back again with Cuman auxiliaries. After a vain
attempt to besiege and capture Lovech, Isaac Angelus concluded peace,
recognizing the autonomy of the brothers Peter and Assen, and taking with him as
hostage a third brother of theirs, the future Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan.

Before long, however, many Bulgarian boyars came to envy Peter
and Assen their royal status, and in 1196 the unrest that had been seething
erupted. That year Assen was murdered by Ivanko, an ambitious nobleman, and his
brother Peter suffered a similar fate a few months later.

The third of the ambitious brothers, Kaloyan, sometimes known as
Ioannicius (Ioannitsa), now came into his own. Kaloyan, who reigned from 1197 to
1207, is a key figure in medieval Bulgarian history: his intervention in the
struggle between Rome and the Crusaders on the one hand, and the Byzantine
empire of Nicaea on the other, proved to be of decisive importance. Kaloyan was
anxious to establish the legitimacy of his rule, and from 1199 kept up an
interesting correspondence with Pope Innocent III, culminating in the sending of
a papal legate,

75

Bishop John de Casemaris, from Rome to Tărnovo. On 7 November
1204, the Legate consecrated the Bulgarian Archbishop Basil as primate and
patriarch of Bulgaria, and the next day placed the royal crown on Kaloyan’s
head.

However, Bulgarian relations with the Latins at this period were
by no means uniformly cordial. The marauding activities of the Third Crusade
passing through Bulgaria in 1189 were particularly resented. The Crusaders
suspected the Byzantine emperor of instigating Bulgarian guerilla fighters. In a
letter to his son and successor, Henry VI, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa reported
that thirty-two Bulgarians had been hanged in a single day, ‘suspended like
wolves’, and that their comrades had shadowed the Crusaders as far as Plovdiv,
molesting them with nocturnal raids through all the Bulgarian forests. ‘Yet our
army in turn dreadfully tortured great numbers of them with various kinds of
torments.’

Byzantium finally fell to the Crusaders in 1204, and Baldwin of
Flanders set himself up as emperor. Tsar Kaloyan at first adopted a conciliatory
policy towards the Latin Empire of Constantinople. How' ever, the Latins were
haughty; they informed Kaloyan that the Balkans belonged to the Byzantine sphere
of authority, and that they considered Kaloyan and his subjects to be their
vassals. The Bulgarian tsar there' upon allied himself with various dissatisfied
Greek nobles, and invaded Thrace. In a great battle, fought in 1205 near
Adrianople, the Crusaders were decisively defeated. Emperor Baldwin was taken
prisoner. Accord' ing to one account, he was imprisoned for life in the Baldwin
Tower on the Tsarevets acropolis at Tărnovo. The Latin Empire never fully re'
covered from this shattering blow; the Greeks were enabled to maintain the rival
empire of Nicaea, which remained the leading stronghold of Greek culture and
political power until the downfall of the Latin regime in Constantinople, in
1261.

Copying the example of the Byzantine emperor Basil the Bulgar'
Slayer, Kaloyan styled himself ‘the slayer of Romans’. In 1207 he marched
westwards and rapidly conquered most of Macedonia. In September of that year, he
ambushed and slew the Crusaders’ leader Boniface of Montferrat. Two months
later, as he was besieging Thessalonica, Kaloyan was murdered in his tent by the
Cuman Voivoda Manastras, a move instigated by dissident Bulgar boyars.

(Fig. 12)

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Fig. 12. St Demetrius, patron saint of Thessalonica, slaying the
Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan (1207). Kaloyan was actually murdered while besieging
that city, by the Voivoda Manastras; this was regarded as divine punishment.
From a fourteenth-century Gospel miniature, in the Rila monastery. (After
Naslednikova)

The boyars set on the throne a nephew of Kaloyan, Boril by name
(1207-18). An unpopular and feeble ruler, Boril is chiefly remembered for the
Church council which he summoned in 1211 to try and root out the Bogomil heresy.
The Bogomils identified themselves with the oppressed and impoverished peasants
and townsfolk, and enjoyed considerable popular support. Boril’s persecutions,
as well as his military ineptitude, led to a revolt in Vidin. In 1218, the son
of Tsar Assen I, by name Ivan Assen, returned from exile in Russia at the head
of a company of Russian and Cuman mercenaries, and also a Bulgarian contingent.
The citizens of Tărnovo opened their gates to him; Tsar Boril was deposed and
blinded, and Ivan Assen began his victorious and brilliant reign as tsar which
lasted until 1241.

Ivan Assen II rapidly restored the shattered fortunes of the
Bulgarian realm. He himself married the daughter of the King of Hungary; one of
his daughters he married to the brother of the Despot of Epirus, and a second to
the son of the King of Serbia. The Latins in Constantinople invited Ivan Assen
to marry his youngest daughter Elena to the youthful Emperor Baldwin II
(1228-61), and to act as regent for Baldwin throughout his minority.

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The prospect of Bulgarian domination at Constantinople alarmed
the ambitious Greek Despot of Epirus, Theodore Angelus (also referred to in the
sources as Theodore Ducas and Theodore Comnenus, through his family connections
with these great Houses). Theodore denounced his former alliance with Bulgaria
and in 1230 invaded Thrace from Adrianople. Tsar Ivan Assen II marched out to
meet the invaders with a banner to which he attached the actual parchment of the
treaty which Theodore had violated. A pitched battle took place close Fig. 13 to
the village of Klokotnitsa, near Haskovo, on the day of the Forty Martyrs. The
Greek and other levies of Theodore Angelus were annihilated or put to flight,
and the Despot himself was captured and blinded.

(Fig. 13)

In memory of this victory, Ivan Assen II built and dedicated the
church of the Forty Martyrs by a bridge at the foot of the Tsarevets acropolis
in Tărnovo. As well as installing there the fine inscribed granite pillar of the
old Bulgar Khan Omurtag, he set up a commemorative marble column of his own
recording the victory at Klokotnitsa, and

Fig. 13 Bulgaria and the Latin States after the fall of
Constantinople in 1204, showing the location of the Battle of Klokotnitsa (1230)

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Fig. 14 A Bulgarian tsar (Ivan Assen II ?) and his warriors.
Scene commemorating the Battle of Klokotnitsa, from a fourteenth-century fresco
painting in the church of Saints Peter and Paul, Great Tărnovo. (After
Naslednikova)

declaring himself lord of all territories from Adrianople to
Durazzo - Greek, Serbian and Albanian alike:

The Franks
hold only the cities close to Constantinople and Constantinople itself; but even
they are under the sway of my empire, since they have no other Tsar but me, and
only thanks to me do they survive, for God has so ordained it.

Another notable success of this outstanding monarch was the final
restoration of the Bulgarian Orthodox patriarchate, initiated by Kaloyan, but
under Papal sponsorship, in 1204. This time, the Greek Orthodox bishops of
Nicaea recognized Joachim, the Bulgarian Metropolitan of Tărnovo, as an
autonomous patriarch, in 1235. The Bulgarian patriarchate endured until the fall
of Tărnovo to the Turks in 1393, and was then extinguished until after the
liberation of Bulgaria in 1877-78.

(Plate 29, Fig. 37)

The name of Tsar Ivan Assen is closely linked to the part of the
Rhodope fortress system which lies astride the main road from Plovdiv southwards
over the mountains to the Aegean, via the modern Smolyan region. Immediately
south of Assenovgrad (‘city of Assen’) is the craggy and inaccessible Assenova
Krepost or Assen’s Castle, with its distinctive

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church of the Virgin of Petrich. This complex of buildings was
restored by Ivan Assen in 1231, and used as a fortress until 1410. On the cliff
is a little known Slavonic inscription, the gist of which is:

In the year
6739 from the Creation [1231], Indiction 4, the man elevated by God, Ivan Assen
II, tsar of the Bulgarians, Greeks and other peoples, fortified this castle, and
installed as governor of the fortress Alexis the Sebastos (‘Sevast’).

It is interesting to note that the wording of this inscription so
offended certain local Greeks that the original text was effaced in 1883 by
order of the mayor of Assenovgrad. Fortunately it had been recorded earlier, and
could be restored by the initiative of the historian Professor V. N. Zlatarski.
I saw and verified the renewed inscription when I visited Assen’s Castle in
1971.

(Fig. 15)

This mention of an official bearing the exalted title of sebastos
reminds us of the extent to which the state and court apparatus of the Second
Bulgarian Empire was impregnated with Byzantine elements. Medieval manuscripts
and frescoes show us Bulgarian rulers, princes and princesses clad in exact
replicas of Byzantine robes and regalia. In Bulgarian charters we find mention
of dignitaries termed comes (‘count’); kefaliya or kephalotes,

Fig. 15 Bulgarian provincial grandee: Constantine, Despot of
Kyustendil, with his wife, Tamara, daughter of Tsar Ivan Alexander, and two of
her sisters. In the painting, the court costumes shine with scarlet and gold,
making it one of the finest Bulgarian medieval family portrait groups. From the
fourteenth-century Gospel manuscript of Tsar Ivan Alexander, in the British
Library. (After Naslednikova)

a chief or headman;
duka or duke; kastrophylax or
castle commandant; epikerni, originally a wine-taster, later a privy
councillor; catepan, a military governor-general: alagator, a
squadron commander, and many others. There are also a number of purely Slavonic
titles. Gone for ever are the old Bulgar ranks of tarkhan, bagatur
and so many others, thus indicating that the tsars of the Second Bulgarian
Empire had repudiated their old nomadic Turkic past and had been drawn into the
cultural orbit of Constantinople.

Fiscal terms of this period relating to taxes and dues are often
derived from Byzantine originals, as evinced by such Bulgarian words as komod,
mitat and ariko. (Mitaton in Greek means a tax or tax
office, aerikon is the poll-tax.)

(Plate 55)

Tsar Ivan Assen II reorganized the financial system of Bulgaria,
being the first ruler to strike coinage in large quantities, mostly silver
pieces (aspers). The coinage was partly modelled on that of Venice, with

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which power the Tărnovo court did a great amount of business.
Affinn ties also exist between the Bulgarian silver coinage and that of the
Greek empire of Trebizond, the Trebizond asper or ‘white piece’, also the silver
coinage of Cilician Armenia. Beautiful gold pieces were struck, resembling the
Byzantine scyphate or concave nomisma.

A network of roads - though most of them were little better than
tracks - linked Tărnovo with Durazzo and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) on the Adriatic, and
Varna, Nessebăr and Burgas on the Black Sea. Another highway led over the modern
Shipka Pass towards Adrianople and Constantinople. The journey from Tărnovo to
Durazzo via Lovech, Sofia and Kyustendil commonly took as long as thirty days.

(Fig. 16)

A substantial merchant quarter existed at the foot of the Tărnovo
acropolis of Tsarevets, largely inhabited by foreign business men and their
families and staff- rather like the Moscow foreigners’ sloboda of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Now a suburb of modern Tărnovo, the site of
this medieval merchant quarter was pointed out to me when I visited the city in
1967 and 1971. According to documents published by F. Miklosich and others, Ivan
Assen II showed special favour to the Ragusans, merchants from Dubrovnik, since
these were largely Slav by blood. He granted them numerous privileges and styled
them his ‘well- beloved and most faithful guests’.

After the death of Ivan Assen II in 1241, decline set in.
External dangers - particularly the onslaughts of the Mongols - and rapid
changes of ruler at home led to scenes of violence. In the space of four
decades, Bulgaria had six rulers: Koloman I (1241-46), Michael II Assen
(1246-57), the usurper Mico (1257), then Constantine Assen Tikh the cripple
(1257-77), the swineherd Ivailo (1277-79), and Ivan Assen III (1279-80). John
III Vatatzes, emperor of Nicaea (d. 1254), took the offensive against Michael II
Assen, and recaptured the Rhodope region, Adrianople and other parts of southern
Bulgaria, while Michael VIII Palaeologus extended the Byzantine frontier to the
foot-hills of the Balkan range, and seized the Black Sea ports of Sozopol,
Develtus, Anchialus and Nessebăr (1263).

(Plates 30-32. Plate 33)

The Hungarians captured Vidin on the Danube, which from 1261
became the centre of an autonomous West Bulgarian province, ruled by a vassal of
Hungary named Yakov Svetoslav, who arrogated to himself

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Fig. 17 Tsar Constantine Assen Tikh and Empress Irina. Fresco in
the Boyana church, near Sofa (1259). The tsar, portrayed in his prime, wears the
regalia of the Bulgarian court, modelled on that of Byzantium; in later years he
became a cripple. (After Naslednikova)

the title of tsar. After the death of the Hungarian king Stephen
V in 1272, Svetoslav ruled for some years as a virtually independent sovereign.

The twenty-year reign of Constantine Assen Tikh was marked by a
deterioration in the lot of the common people. To maintain himself in power, the
cripple Constantine married a Byzantine princess, paid tribute to the Tatar Khan
of the Golden Horde, and turned a blind eye to the exactions of the boyars and
of the established Church. All this weighed down on the peasantry, burdened as
they were with dues in kind and in cash, with forced labour and corvees, also
military service at the beck and call of their feudal lord and of their king.
Bogomil propaganda continued, preaching a nihilistic and anarchistic attitude
towards Church and State.

The result of all this was the uprising of the swineherd Ivailo
in 1277. Few episodes in Bulgarian history can rival this amazing saga, which
resulted in a simple peasant being crowned Tsar in Great Tărnovo. Many features
of the uprising anticipate the rebellions of Wat Tyler and Robert Ket in
fourteenths and sixteenth-century England and those of Stenka Razin and Pugachev
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia.

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According to the Byzantine chronicler Pachymeres (1242-1310),
Ivailo was a simple peasant of austere habits who fed on bread and wild berries.
In conversation with other peasants as poor as himself, Ivailo would often tell
of strange visions of his mysterious destiny, which, he was convinced, was to
save Bulgaria from her plight, and regenerate the nation. Ivailo began by
gathering around him a band of determined patriots who attacked local
detachments of the Mongol Golden Horde, and hurled them back across the Danube.
Advancing on Tărnovo, Ivailo was met by the royal army of Tsar Constantine Assen
Tikh, who was defeated and slain on the battlefield. The whole of Bulgaria
rapidly fell under Ivailo’s sway, and events culminated in his marriage to the
Empress Maria, a Greek princess, and widow of the slain Tsar Constantine Assen
Tikh.

Within two years, the regime of the swineherd tsar Ivailo was
brought to an abrupt end. The simple peasants who had supported him grew
disillusioned with his royal pretensions and excessive pride; the Byzam tines
sent an expeditionary force with a protégé of Constantinople, who was installed
on the throne of Tărnovo as Ivan Assen III (1279-80). Ivailo put Ivan Assen III
to flight, only to find himself assailed by the feudal nobles, who proclaimed
one of their number, George Terter, tsar. Ivailo attempted to enlist the support
of the Tatars to restore his fortunes, but he was assassinated at a banquet by
orders of the Mongol khan Nogai.

The continuing weakness of the Bulgarian state contributed to a
most important phenomenon in Balkan history of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries - namely the rise of Serbia under the Nemanya dynasty. The founder of
the dynasty in 1168 was Stephen Nemanya, Grand Zhupan of Rashka. Stephen’s
youngest son, Prince Rastko, secretly left his father’s court and went to Mount
Athos to become a monk. Under the name of Sava, Rastko became the first
archbishop of Serbia, a patron of education and one of the country’s eminent
statesmen. St Sava was a friend of the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Assen II, and died at
Tărnovo while on a pastoral mission to Bulgaria. He is buried there in the
church of the Forty Martyrs, at the foot of the Tsarevets palace hill.

Other distinguished members of the Serbian Nemanya dynasty were
Stephen Urosh I (1243-76), and his son Milutin (1281-1321),

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Stephen Urosh III Dechanski (1321-31), and Stephen Dushan
(1331-55). It was Stephen Dechanski who slew the Bulgarian tsar Michael Shishman
at Kyustendil in 1330; Dushan took Ohrida, Salonica and Mount Athos, and revived
the idea of a Slav emperor of Byzantium, an idea which had been so dear to the
Bulgarian tsar Symeon, and had been briefly taken up by Ivan Assen II. The
growing political and cultural might of Serbia was certainly a contributory
cause of the relative decline of Bulgaria after the ‘proletarian interlude’
associated with the name of the peasant tsar Ivailo.

Tsar George Terter (1280-92) is often considered to have been of
Cuman descent. He embarked on a strongly anti-Byzantine foreign policy, allying
himself with Charles of Anjou, ruler of Sicily, who was planning an all-out
onslaught on the newly restored Byzantine Empire. The famous uprising known as
the Sicilian Vespers took place in 1282, and put paid to Charles of Anjou’s
military plans and dreams of empire. The uprising also resulted in a
strengthening of the Byzantine position in the Adriatic and the Balkans, and in
an invasion of Bulgaria by the Mongol khan Nogai, with whom the Byzantine
emperor Michael VIII had struck up an alliance. Tsar George Terter was even
forced to submit to becoming a Tatar vassal. In the West, an autonomous state
arose under the despot Shishman, with its capital at Vidin. Shishman was to be
the founding father of Bulgaria’s last royal dynasty of medieval times, the
Shishmanids.

Tsar George Terter finally fled the country and took refuge in
Byzantium. The Mongol Nogai set up as tsar a minor bolyar, Smilets by name, who
reigned from 1292 to 1298. However, he was displaced by the young and vigorous
son of Tsar George Terter, Theodore Svetoslav, who eliminated the Mongol element
root and branch. Patriarch Joachim II, accused of unduly favouring the Mongols,
was sentenced to summary execution by being hurled off a high crag on the
Tsarevets in Tărnovo. This crag, which is still shown to visitors at the present
day, was the ‘Tarpeian Rock’ of medieval Bulgaria, many alleged traitors and
criminals meeting their doom there.

Theodore Svetoslav reigned for nearly a quarter of a century
until 1322, and married Theodora, daughter of the Byzantine emperor. Taking
advantage of the decline of the Byzantine Empire, he recovered

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large tracts of Bulgarian territory south of the main Balkan
range, including the Black Sea ports of Mesembria (Nessebăr), Sozopol and
Anchialus. Through the towns of the Black Sea littoral, trade flourished with
Venice and Genoa, and distinctive Bulgarian silver coins were struck in large
numbers. The major article of export was grain, and the Genoese were important
middlemen in provisioning the city of Constantinople with this vital commodity.

(Plate 55)

With the one-year reign of Theodore Svetoslav’s son and
successor, George II, the Terter dynasty became extinct.

The bolyars then elected as their tsar the Despot of Vidin,
Michael Shishman, who reigned from 1323 until his death in battle against the
Serbs in 1330. The Shishman dynasty is associated with the last flowering of
Bulgaria’s medieval culture prior to the Turkish onslaught, its members being
great patrons of the arts and letters.

(Plate 33)

The reunion of Vidin, with its palace castle of Baba Vida, and
the Tărnovo kingdom was an event of some moment. However, this had the effect of
alienating Serbia, which had pretensions to suzerainty over Vidin. Michael
Shishman was married to Anna, sister of the Serbian king Stephen Urosh III, whom
he divorced in order to marry Theodora, sister of the Byzantine emperor
Andronicus III. The Bulgarians were joined by the Byzantines for a military
offensive against Serbia - a symbolic prelude to the disastrous Balkan Wars that
became a feature of the European political scene just before World War I.

The Bulgarian attack on the Serbs in 1330 failed ignominiously
with a military debacle at Velbuzhd (Kyustendil), in which Tsar Michael Shishman
lost his life. The sole gainers from this affair were the Ottoman Turks, now
established throughout much of Western Asia Minor and the Aegean littoral, and
only waiting for the signal to invade the Balkans en masse, as they did with
overwhelming success during the second half of the fourteenth century.

After a brief interlude, Michael Shishman’s nephew Ivan Alexander
was proclaimed tsar. The likeness of this interesting ruler may be seen in a
large miniature painting in the Slavonic Gospel manuscript brought back from
Mount Athos in 1837 by Robert Curzon (see Chapter VII); his family are also
shown, in full regalia.

Ivan Alexander began his reign with a campaign against the
Byzantine Empire. A decisive victory over the Greeks at Russocastro in 1332
enabled the Bulgarians to regain the Thracian lands which Emperor Andronicus III
had seized after the battle of Velbuzhd two years before.

A peace treaty was signed, and this peace lasted for thirty
years. Tsar Ivan Alexander also improved relations with the King of Serbia.

In retrospect, the forty-year rule of Ivan Alexander appears as a
false dawn, a swan-song of medieval Bulgaria’s political and cultural glory. Yet
the long reign had a favourable effect on its economic and cultural life. The
home market and trade with the Byzantine Empire and with Venice revived.
Bulgaria became a vital supplier of cereals and lumber, because the Turks had
seized a large part of Asia Minor and cut off Constantinople’s supplies of raw
materials from the south and east; they had also interrupted the Egyptian trade
with Venice. The Bulgarian Black Sea ports became animated centres of export and
impon trade. Nessebăr in particular was enriched by many new churches, public
buildings and port installations, and a Venetian colony was set up in Varna.

(Plates 30-32, Fig. 38)

Fig. 19 Tsar Ivan Alexander and his second consort, Empress Sara-
heodora, a converted Jewess, with two of their children: the future Tsar Ivan
Shishman, and the Sebastocrator Ivan Assen. From the Gospels of Tsar Ivan
Alexander, in the British Library. (After Naslednikova)

87

Concerning Bulgarian relations with Venice a number of
characteristic documents have come down to us. For instance, we learn that in
1352, Doge Andrea Dandolo sent an embassy to Tsar Ivan Alexander in Tărnovo, to
negotiate a fresh trade treaty. This was signed on 4 October 1352, and includes
several interesting features. Thus, the possessions of Venetian citizens are
guaranteed against plunder or seizure in the event of shipwreck or death. In the
event of an offence being committed by one member of the Venetian community, the
other members are not to be held collectively responsible, nor for each other’s
debts. The houses of Venetians were immune from arbitrary entry or search. The
Venetians had the right to build churches and trading depots anywhere they
wished, even in the interior hinterland of the country. Customs duties were
fixed at three per cent. These arrangements entailed a certain abrogation of
Bulgarian suzerainty, and the Venetians gained advantages similar to those
enjoyed by foreign powers in the Ottoman Empire, during the Capitulations.

(Plates 48-50)

Ivan Alexander was a great patron of the arts and sciences. The
Tărnovo school of painting attained great renown; Slavonic manuscripts were
copied and illuminated; new churches built, old ones restored and renovated. At
the Kilifarevo monastery, not far from Tărnovo, a veritable Bulgarian academy
was established by the monk Theodosius (see Chapter VI).

These improvements brought benefit mainly to the princely, the
merchant and the monastic classes. The condition of the peasants and the urban
poor failed to improve - indeed it grew worse. The peasants were the worst off,
due to the intensification of serfdom, which bound them to the land, and
inflicted crippling dues and taxes in cash and in kind. From the middle of the
fourteenth century, hordes of Turks began to ravage the country, plundering and
burning the villages, and carrying off the inhabitants to be sold as slaves. In
despair, many of the serfs took to the hills and the Bulgarian lands became more
and more depopulated.

A number of other factors combined to speed Bulgaria’s decline in
the later years of Ivan Alexander’s reign.

Bogomilism once more reared its head, and other sects also
appeared, such as the Adamites and the Varlaamites. Two Church councils held in
Tărnovo, in 1350 and 1360, failed to put a stop to the ideological schism.
Division within the Church was aggravated further by the spread of a quietist,
contemplative doctrine known as Hesychasm, whose adepts are sometimes termed umhilis animi - people with their souls in their navels. This movement,
whose supporters even included the Bulgarian patriarch Euthymius, was ill-fitted
for this time of crisis, when Christianity in Byzantium and the Balkans was
threatened by militant Islam.

(Fig. 21)

Tsar Ivan Alexander himself contributed to the break-up of the
Bulgarian realm. He abandoned his first wife, and married Theodora, a converted
Jewess. The doting monarch disinherited the sons of his first marriage, to
proclaim as heir his son by Theodora, Ivan Shishman. In order to placate the
rightful heir, his eldest son Ivan Stratsimir, the tsar separated off Vidin from
the Bulgarian monarchy about 1360, and set up Stratsimir as ruler there. From
1365 to 1370, Vidin was occupied by the Hungarians, who sent Franciscan monks to
convert the people to the Roman faith.

89

The boyar Balik set himself up as an independent ruler in the
Dobrudja; he was succeeded by his brother Dobroditsa (from whose name that of
the region derives).

All this contributed to the rapid spread of Turkish power in the
Balkans. In 1362, Adrianople fell to the Turks, thus blocking the land route
from Bulgaria to Constantinople. Two years later, general Lala Shahin entered
Plovdiv, and took up his residence there as the first Turkish beylerbeyi of
Rumelia, as the region was to be called for the next five centuries. Sultan
Murad I (1362-89) established his court at Adrianople. The Turkish advance was
accompanied by systematic measures for colonization. The native population was
removed in great numbers to slavery in Asia Minor. Turkish colonists were
settled in the conquered districts, and the Ottoman nobles, especially the
Sultan’s generals, were rewarded with generous gifts of land. On the Black Sea,
the Byzantines took the opportunity in 1364 of reoccupying the port of
Anchialus, north of the bay of Burgas. Amadeus of Savoy took Nessebăr from Ivan
Alexander in 1366, and handed it over to his cousin, the Byzantine emperor John
V Palaeologus.

The last of the Shishman dynasty, Ivan (1371-93), inherited a
virtually impossible task, and acquitted himself gallantly up to the inevitable
debacle. Ivan Shishman’s reign began most inauspiciously. The Serbs attempted to
check the Ottoman advance into Macedonia, and this culminated in the battle of
Chernomen, on the river Maritsa, which took place in September 1371. Drunk with
wine and conceit, the large Serbian army was surprised by a handful of Turkish
Spahis, and annihilated together with its commanders.

During the following months, many Bulgarian towns fell to the
Turks. These included Yambol, Karnobat and Samokov, though the great centre of
Sredets, the modern Sofia, held out until 1385. Both the Byzantine emperor John
V Palaeologus, and the Bulgarian tsar, were forced to bow the knee before Sultan
Murad, and acknowledge themselves his vassals. Ivan Shishman sent his beautiful
sister, Kera-Tamara, to the Sultan’s harem.

All this encouraged the rulers of the breakaway Bulgarian states
of Vidin and of the Dobrudja in their centrifugal aims and ambitions. Ivan
Shishman’s half-brother, Ivan Stratsimir, advanced southwards from his capital
at Vidin, and invaded the Sofia plain. In the Dobrudja the despot Dobroditsa
also remained independent of the Bulgarian tsar in Tărnovo. He contrived to
construct a fleet of his own, with which he fought the Genoese; he even sent a
naval force right across the Black Sea to intervene in the internal disputes of
the empire of Trebizond. When Dobroditsa’s son, Ivanko, succeeded him, he
reversed his father’s policy and concluded a commercial pact with Genoa in 1387.

A last flicker of Bulgarian national resistance occurred in 13
87. In that year, Prince Lazar of Serbia and Tvurdko, Ban of Bosnia, defeated
the Turks at Plochnik. Tsar Ivan Shishman threw off the Turkish yoke and
installed himself in the fortified castle of Nicopolis on the Danube. The
despatch of an Ottoman force thirty thousand strong soon brought him to heel. A
number of Bulgarian strong-points were occupied by the Turks, as a prelude to
the final annexation of the land. For instance, the impregnable castle of
Ovechgrad above Provadia (between Tărnovo and Varna) was occupied by a ruse in
1388, when a Turkish expeditionary force under ‘Alī Pasha pleaded with the
Bulgarian commandant for shelter from the bad weather. The Turks,
characteristically enough, rose in a body during the night, murdered their
Bulgarian hosts, and took over the fortress. These and many other interesting
details were related to me when I visited Provadia in 1971 in company with Mr
Alexander Kuzov of the Varna Archaeological Museum.

The Balkan Christians suffered a fresh disaster at the battle of
Kossovo Field (‘the field of the Blackbirds’) on 15 June 1389, in which Prince
Lazar’s Serbian and allied troops were overwhelmed by the Ottomans. Sultan Murad
was killed by a Serbian patriot, but the Serbs and Bosnians were cut to pieces
by the Turks. Prince Lazar was taken prisoner and executed together with his
nobles.

(Fig. 16)

The new sultan, Bayazid, lost no time in completing his conquest
of what remained of independent Bulgaria. After a three-month siege, in which
the townsfolk were led and inspired by Patriarch Euthymius, Great Tărnovo fell
on 17 July 1393. Euthymius was imprisoned in a monastery, and both the
independent Bulgarian patriarchate and the Shishman dynasty were brought to an
end.

91

The autonomous provinces of the Dobrudja and Vidin were soon
swallowed up by the Turkish sultan. In the Dobrudja, the despot Ivanko was
replaced for a short period (1390-91) by the Wallachian prince from southern
Romania, Voivode Mircea the Old; but after this short interlude the Dobrudja
fell to the Turks. Tsar Ivan Stratsimir ruled for a short time in Vidin on the
Danube, as a Turkish vassal.

The final collapse of Christian hopes for the liberation of the
Balkans occurred in 1396. The occupation of Bulgaria meant that Catholic Hungary
was directly threatened, while the Latin principalities in and around Greece
felt themselves menaced. The Pope and the Venetians spurred on King Sigismund of
Hungary to undertake a crusade against the infidel; this was joined by a
contingent of knights from France, while Venice despatched a small fleet to the
Dardanelles. But the motley army of King Sigismund and his Western allies had
scarcely crossed the Danube when they were annihilated by a well disciplined
Turkish army which fell upon them near Nicopolis, on 25 September 1396.

The last surviving Bulgarian dynast, Ivan Stratsimir, had allowed
the Crusaders free passage through Vidin on their way from Hungary. Sultan
Bayazid now took over Vidin and deposed Stratsimir. With him there perished the
last vestiges of Bulgarian independence, which was to lie submerged until
the war of liberation in 1877, nearly five centuries later. It is, however,
worth noting that sporadic attempts by Western Christendom to liberate the
Balkans and free Byzantium from the Turkish yoke continued right up to the middle of the
fifteenth century. It was on Bulgarian territory, near Varna, on 10 November
1444, that the great battle took place which ended in an Ottoman victory, and
the death of Vladislav III, King of Hungary and Poland. Cardinal Cesarini, the
instigator of this belated and unfortunate Crusade, also lost his life. All this
in turn led to the isolation, and then, the capture of Constantinople in 1453.